Web Site Accessibility Blog

Yet another example of how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can screw up a site at Wait till I Come! .

I guess this has become my crusade - a defense of SEO and an offensive on crappy SEO. How to do both at the same time? That’s the question. There is no central standards organization - the closest thing to some kind of standard is the search engines themselves. Google is the only engine that provides a full list of recommendations and warnings against specific SEO tactics.

I was actually in a conversation about his last night - there is no actual definition of what an SEO does. Anyone who messes around with a site’s title attributes and stuffs a few keywords into alt attributes carries the same “SEO” title as one who works with the site as a whole, considering usability, accessibility and overall site performance.

In other words - anyone can be an SEO. The only way I have found to separate the different “types” of SEO is to find that person’s view of the goal of a campaign. Sadly, many SEO’s consider better rankings the ultimate measurement of a successful site marketing campaign - welcome to the late 90’s of SEO.

My view of SEO is a holistic approach. SEO has its place along with design, usability, accessibility, copywriting, architecture and all aspects of the user experience. In this view, the ultimate measure of a campaign is the bottom line results: Money. If the sales and leads don’t improve, then the campaign isn’t working. All the rankings in the world don’t mean anything if the site can’t convert. SEO depends on a well-built and usable site. Many SEO’s understand this total site concept, but sadly, most don’t.

SEO is not the killer app. SEO is part of a total site marketing strategy. Bad SEO turns people away, just like a bad design, poor accessibility and terrible copywriting. The term ethical only confuses the issue. “Ethical” has nothing to do with it. The main issues are improving the site to make it better for the user - hidden text, keyword stuffing, and overloading links are all “Amateur SEO” from the 90’s that were bad ideas then and still bad ideas now. I call it Amateur SEO, because their methods haven’t grown up enough to understand how SEO is supposed to work.

The author summarizes his experience with these thoughts:

* Make the site independent of file names
* Make sure your design can fit a lot of links
* Be sure to keep everything in the template flexible – and don’t think for a moment that you can separate content and markup – you will be asked to add a lot of title attributes.

Great - what an indictment of the SEO industry. Each one of those things will not do much of anything for your rankings. Not only are they not effective - they make your site look like it was recycled from the trash bin.
File names can help a site - but it’s one of those extremely small factors. If it’s not broke - don’t fix it is my advice on that. Loading pages with links and stuffing title attributes is just bad.

I found this rant courtesy of 456 Berea Street and the term “so-called Ethical SEO” is being thrown around. In my opinion - it’s completely justified. The comments on both blogs are very eye opening to anyone in the SEO industry.

A year ago I had the privilege of speaking at Search Engine Strategies, where I was on a panel discussion of Web Standards and SEO with Eric Meyer and Shari Thurow. See “Worthless Shady Criminals: A defense of SEO“. As part of my presentation, I brought up a site that relied on stuffing keywords into every available attribute (title, alt, link title, CSS Layers, etc.) I turned off the display and started JAWS and let an audience of a few hundred SEO’s listen to what a screen reader will do when faced with this “crap.” The audience, 99% of which I am sure had never given accessibility a thought, was amazed when they were forced to site there and listen to a keyword stuffed page. I think it opened some eyes to this problem of Amateur SEO.

Basically – I feel the pain and I hear what you are saying when you complain about “so-called-Ethical SEO’s�. I feel the same when I run into these Amateur SEO’s and have to fix these amateur methods and sometimes, try to get their work removed and get the client’s web site back into Google, as it was kicked out for using many of these methods.

If you are a site owner here are a few ideas:
-Before you work with any SEO, get an idea of their definition of success. (Rankings only? Or increased conversions?)
-Do they understand how usability, design, architecture and page layout influence conversions?
-For the safest route - measure their proposed methods against the Google SEO guidelines.
-Talk to their clients – ask pertinent questions.
-Get actual reports that they have provided clients.

By no means is this list exhaustive – that’s a project for another day . . .